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BEFORE THE BOMB

This is a long essay about the changing ratio of military to civilian casualties written by Historian Mark Selden

Before the Bomb: The “Good War”, Air Power and the Logic of Mass Destruction

Mark SeldenThis essay explores the logic and the consequences-for its victims and for subsequent global patterns of warfare-of new technologies and strategies ofmass destruction associated with the rise of air power and the obliterationof the distinction between combatant and non-combatant in World World WarII: from the European theatre, with the bombing strategies adopted by theGermans, the British, and the Americans in the European theatre, it reacheda climax in the final months of the Pacific War with U.S. firebombing ofJapanese cities and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Elimination of the distinction between combatant and non-combatant wouldshape all subsequent wars from Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War and theethnic conflicts of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, to mention buta few.The combatant-non-combatant distinction has always been at bestfragile, even ephemeral, frequently providing little or no protection forthose deemed subhuman.This is well illustrated by the long history ofreligious and colonial wars.Nevertheless, certain constraints onbarbarism did exist and affected the conduct of all sides in World War II.The assault on these norms in the context of new warmaking technologies isamong the legacies of the war.

Public debate in the United States, Japan and Europe has long pivoted onthe ethical and political issues associated with the U.S. decision to dropthe atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.U.S. policy in general, and thefinal year of the Pacific War in particular,raises important questions ofmorality and war concerning the elimination of restraints on the killing ofnoncombatants during the preceding phases of a war which took more than 50million lives.The totalism of the war was reinforced at the outset by American insistencethat the only acceptable outcome lay in unconditional surrender of theenemy, a position that it maintained with respect to Japan untilimmediately after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when itpromptly softened its terms.Franklin Roosevelt’s words delivered in hismessage to Congress a month after Pearl Harbor provide the classicmoral-philosophical statement undergirding the total war position:

“There never has been-there never can be-successful compromise between good and evil.Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, anddecency, and faith.”

Ideological bases for the destruction of noncombatants defined as “theenemy” existed on all sides of the conflict from the outset, yet there werealso constraints at work in the early years of the war.These constraintson policymakers derived in part from historically grounded moral stricturesthat placed limits (however fragile) on the bounds of warfare, for examplethose protecting women, children, and the elderly, from direct attack.

More important than moral imperatives were well-grounded fears on all sidesthat the escalation of conflict by deliberate targeting of noncombatantsfor destruction, would provoke devastating retaliation.The partial andimperfect restraints on the use of poison gas provide perhaps the bestdocumented example of such fears.With respect to the uses of air power,the belief long persisted in some influential quarters that the most cost-effective bombing strategies were those that pinpointed destruction of enemy forces and installations, factories, and railroads, not those designed to terrorize or kill noncombatants.Such a view influenced U.S. bombing strategy prior to late 1944 or early 1945, a point to which we return below.Air War and the Noncombatant

The classic combat of World War I was trench warfare involving industrialnations of roughly comparable strength and technology.World War II wasdistinctive both for the growing importance played by the new weaponry,particularly air power and bombs, and the broadening of the theatres of warto include the colonial and semi-colonial zones as well as the industrialheartland.During World War II, Britain, Germany and subsequently theU.S., among others, shifted from selective to systematic destruction, that is from attempts to destroy verifiable military and industrial objectives to the use of air power to terrorize and kill civilians.There were a number of important and controversial examples of terrorbombing early, on including the bombing of Guernica in Spain in 1937 andespecially German destruction of central Rotterdam with a toll of 40,000civilian lives in order to force the Dutch surrender in May 1940.Thedecisive deployment of airpower against European cities, however, was inthe 1940-41 German-British conflict which constituted the most importantprelude to the U.S. onslaught against Japanese cities in spring and summerof 1945.Viewed in terms of loss of life, the bombing of European citieswas but a pale shadow of what lay ahead in a Japan that by 1945 wasvirtually defenseless against bombing raids.This essay focuses on U.S.destruction of Japanese cities and the slaughter of civilians in the finalhalf year of the war,practices that deeply influenced the conduct of allsubsequent wars yet have been largely overshadowed by the impact of theatomic bomb.The theoretical underpinnings for strategic or area bombing-the technicalterms that mask the reality of the annihilation of civilians-were fullyspelled out prior to and following World War I, particularly in thewritings of the Italian General Giulio Douhet.

By the early 1930s, U.S. General Billy Mitchell and others had already pinpointed Japan’s wood and paper cities as prime targets for firebombing.Mitchell warned of the “yellow military peril” of a Japan bent on attacking both its possessionsand the U.S. itself long before Pearl Harbor.

Nevertheless, in the early years of the Second World War, in both Europeand the Pacific, cities were rarely targeted for destruction from the air.Roosevelt and his advisers, as well as a range of American writers andpublic figures from Ernest Hemingway to Herbert Hoover, bitterly denouncedthe most egregious instances of the bombing of civilian populations byGermany, Japan and Russia.To be sure, adversaries invariably demonizedthe enemy and cloaked their own mission in heroic garb, yet particularlywhere the adversary was a formidable military-industrial power with thecapacity to retaliate, tacit rules limited the uses of air power.Notuntil late 1940 did German bombing attacks target London, killingapproximately 40,000 people in a six month period, and even then theprimary targets were ostensibly military and military-related industry andinfrastructure including bases, large factories and docks.By early 1941,however, Britain’s Royal Air Force Bomber Command formalized what it hadbeen doing in recent months, having abandoned all pretense of precisionbombing of military and industrial targets in favor of bombing cities withthe aim of killing workers and disrupting and demoralizing society.Boththe British and the Germans shifted the focus of their attacks to nightbombing.Civilian populations not bases or even factories were theprimary targets.Both the RAF and the Luftwaffe, having proved hopelesslyinept and vulnerable in daytime raids, limited themselves to night attackin which only area bombing and not precision attack was possible in an eraprior to laser technology.In the final years of the war, Max Hastingsobserved, Churchill and his bomber commander Arthur Harris set out toconcentrate “all available forces for the progressive, systematicdestruction of the urban areas of the Reich, city block by city block,factory by factory, until the enemy became a nation of troglodytes,scratching in the ruins.”The debate within U.S. military and political circles over the uses of airpower in the years after Pearl Harbor is illuminating.While the air warin Europe was careening toward civilian bombing, throughout 1942 and 1943,Air Force strategists and generals insisted that tactical bombing ofmilitary and industrial targets was the most cost effective use of airpower. This view was reinforced by the fear that indiscriminate killing ofcivilians could strengthen enemy resolve, a phenomenon that had apparentlyoccurred in both England and Germany under strategic bombing.Thus, atCasablanca in January 1943, the U.S. formally rejected British pressures toshift from daylight to night bombing and reaffirmed its intention tocontinue costly and largely ineffectual daylight precision bombing ofGerman military and industrial targets.In practice, of course, U.S.airpower complemented, and at times directly assisted, the equallyineffective British nighttime area bombing directed against civilianpopulations.

Throughout 1943-44 the U.S. Air Force proclaimed its adherence to precisionbombing.However, as this approach proved futile not only in forcingsurrender on either Germany or Japan but even in inflicting significantdamage on their warmaking capacity, as the sophistication, numbers andrange of U.S. aircraft grew, as the technology of firebombing advanced withthe development of napalm and more effective delivery methods, and as theAir Force sought to strengthen its position in inter-service rivalries andcompetition for resources, pressures mounted for a strategic shift.In theearly months of 1945, the remaining fragile restraints on the bombing ofnoncombatants dissolved just as the United States shifted its attention tothe Pacific theatre and as it gained the capacity to effectively attack theJapanese home islands from newly captured bases in the Pacific.

In the final six months of the war, the U.S. threw the full weight of its airpowerinto campaigns to burn whole Japanese cities to the ground and terrorize,incapacitate and kill their virtually defenseless populations in an effortto force surrender.This shift in the conduct of air war, culminating inthe atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, constitutes among the mostimportant legacies of World War II for the subsequent conduct of war.The techniques for firebombing cities, including nighttime and radarbombing that were honed by British and American fliers in the early 1940sagainst Germany and her European allies, were applied in the final monthsof the war in a series of attacks that began with Operation Thunderclapdirected against Berlin.In Europe, the culmination came on February13-14, 1945 in the destruction of Dresden, a historic cultural center withno significant military industry or bases.At Dresden, by conservativeestimate, 35,000 people were incinerated in a single raid led by Britishbombers with U.S. planes following up.The American writer Kurt Vonnegut,then a young POW in Dresden, later recalled:

They burnt the whole damn town down. . . . Every day we walked into thecity and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as asanitary measure.When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinarybasement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’dsimultaneously had heart failure.Just people sitting there in theirchairs, all dead.A fire storm is an amazing thing.It doesn’t occur innature.It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and thereisn’t a damned thing to breathe.

The destruction of Dresden, with a fire storm visible to flight crews twohundred miles away, was the prelude to the wave of American B-29 firebomband napalm attacks that sowed far greater destruction across virtuallyevery major Japanese city, exacting an immense toll in human lifethroughout the spring and summer of 1945.

“Along with the Nazi extermination camps, the killing of Soviet andAmerican prisoners, and other enemy atrocities,” Ronald Schaffer observes,“Dresden became one of the moral causes célèbres of World War II.”

Thoughfar worse was in the offing, Dresden provoked the last significant publicdiscussion of the bombing of women and children to take place during thewar, and the city became synonymous with terror bombing by the U.S. andBritain.In fact, the debate was largely provoked not by the destructionwrought by the raids, which was already becoming commonplace, but by anAssociated Press report widely published in the U.S. and British pressstating explicitly that “the Allied air commanders have made thelong-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of the greatGerman population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.”American officials quickly acted to neutralize the report, mosteffectively by pointing to the widely publicized great cathedral ofCologne, left standing after U.S. bombing as a symbol of American concern,and by reiterating U.S. adherence to principles restricting attacks totactical bombing of military targets.In fact, in the midst of bombing onmany fronts, and with a sense of victory in the air, U.S. publicdiscussion, not to speak of protest, was minimal; in Britain there wasslightly greater discussion.The bombing continued.Strategic bombing hadpassed its test in the realm of public reaction.Its primary targets wouldnow shift to the destruction of virtually every major Japanese city.Curtis LeMay was appointed commander of the 21st Air Force Headquarters onJanuary 20, 1945 just as a combination of circumstances placed Japanesecities within effective range of U.S. bombers with the capacity to inflictenormous damage at will on a Japanese nation whose depleted air and navalpower left it virtually defenseless against air attack.General LeMaywould carry firebombing and napalming to new levels of technologicalsophistication and terror, first in the cities of Japan and subsequently incity and countryside from Korea to Vietnam.If the bombing of Dresdenproduced a ripple of public debate, no discernible wave of revulsion, notto speak of protest, took place in the U.S. or Europe in the wake of thefar greater destruction of Japanese cities and the slaughter of civilianpopulations on a scale that had no parallel in wartime bombing.For thirty years LeMay served as the most quotable spokesman for U.S.policies of putting enemy cities, villages and forests to the torch fromJapan to Korea to Vietnam.Yet he was just a link in a chain of commandthat routinely sanctioned terror bombing extending upward through the JointChiefs to the president.Every U.S. president from Franklin Roosevelt toBill Clinton has endorsed an approach to warfare that routinely targetsentire populations for annihilation, an approach that eliminates allvestiges of distinction between combatant and non-combatant with deadlyconsequences.That policy and approach came of age in the U.S. firebombingof Japan.

The Firebombing of Japan: A Victim’s Perspective on The Logic of MassDestruction

U.S. raids on Japanese cities began with James Doolittle’s solitary missionof April 18, 1942, widely hailed as the U.S. response to Pearl Harbor.Allsixteen B-25 bombers were lost, however, when they were forced to land inJapanese territory.The U.S. would make no further attempt to raid Japan’shome islands for three years.The full fury of firebombing and napalmwas not unleashed on Japan until the night of March 9-10, 1945.LeMay sent334 B-29s low over Tokyo from recently acquired bases in Guam, Saipan andTinian.Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble with jelliedgasoline and napalm.U.S. bombers carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s,100 pound oil-gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a majorfire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraftin addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters.The attack onan area that the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 87.4 percentresidential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners.Whipped by fierce winds, flames detonated by the bombs leaped across Tokyogenerating immense firestorms that engulfed and killed tens of thousands ofresidents.

In contrast with Vonnegut’s cool “wax museum” description, of Dresdensurvivors, accounts from inside the inferno that engulfed Tokyo chroniclescenes of utter carnage.We have come to measure the efficacy of bombingby throw weights and kill ratios.Here I would like to offer someperspectives drawing on the words of those who felt the wrath of the bombs.

Fleeing the flames, thousands plunged in desperation into the freezingwaters of rivers, canals and Tokyo Bay:

A woman spent the night knee-deep in the bay, holding onto a piling withher three-year-old son clinging to her back; by morning several of thepeople around her were dead of burns, shock, fatigue and hypothermia.Thousands submerged themselves in stagnant, foul-smelling canals with theirmouths just above the surface, but many died from smoke inhalation, anoxia,or carbon monoxide poisoning, or were boiled to death when the fire stormheated the water.Others, huddling in canals connected to the SumidaRiver, drowned when the tide came in. . . . Huge crowds lined the gardensand parks along the Sumida, and as the masses behind them pushed toward theriver, walls of screaming people fell in and vanished.

Police cameraman Ishikawa Koyo described the streets of Tokyo as “rivers offire.Everyone could see flaming pieces of furniture exploding in theheat, while the people themselves blazed like “matchsticks” as their woodand paper homes exploded in flames.Under the wind and the gigantic breathof the fire, immense incandescent vortices rose in a number of places,swirling, flattening, sucking whole blocks of houses into their maelstromof fire.”

Dr. Kubota Shigenori, head of a military rescue unit, recalledthat “In the black Sumida River countless bodies were floating, clothedbodies, naked bodies, all as black as charcoal.It was unreal.These weredead people, but you couldn’t tell whether they were men or women.Youcouldn’t even tell if the objects floating by were arms and legs or piecesof burnt wood.”Father Flaujac, a French cleric, compared the firebombing to the Tokyoearthquake twenty-two years earlier, an event whose massive destruction hadalerted some of the original planners of the Tokyo holocaust to thepossibilities of destruction.

‘In September 1923, during the great earthquake, I saw Tokyo burning for 5days.I saw in Honjo a heap of 33,000 corpses of people who burned orsuffocated at the beginning of the bombardment. . . . After the first quakethere were 20-odd centers of fire, enough to destroy the capital.Howcould the conflagration be stopped when incendiary bombs in the dozens ofthousands now dropped over the four corners of the district and withJapanese houses which are only match boxes? . . . In 1923 the fire spreadon the ground.At the time of the bombings the fire fell from the sky. . .. Where could one fly? The fire was everywhere.’

Nature reinforced man’s handiwork in the form of akakaze, the red wind thatswept with hurricane force across the Tokyo plain and propelled firestormsacross the city with terrifying speed and intensity.The wind drovetemperatures up to eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit, creatingsuperheated vapors that advanced ahead of the flames, killing orincapacitating their victims.“The mechanisms of death were so multipleand simultaneous-oxygen deficiency and carbon monoxide poisoning, radiantheat and direct flames, debris and the trampling feet of stampedingcrowds-that causes of death were later hard to ascertain. . .”

The Strategic Bombing Survey, whose formation a few months earlier providedan important signal of Roosevelt’s support for strategic bombing, provideda technical description of the firestorm and its effects on the city:The chief characteristic of the conflagration. . . was the presence of afire front, an extended wall of fire moving to leeward, preceded by a massof pre-heated, turbid, burning vapors.The pillar was in a much moreturbulent state than that of [a usual] fire storm, and being usually closerto the ground, it produced more flame and heat, and less smoke. . . .

The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a mile from the fire, increased to anestimated 55 miles at the perimeter, and probably more within.An extendedfire swept over 15 square miles in 6 hours. . . . The area of the fire wasnearly 100 percent burned; no structure or its contents escaped damage.The survey concluded-plausibly, but only for events prior to August 6,1945-that “probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a6-hour period than at any time in the history of man.”People died fromextreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, orfrom being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds.

How many people died on the night of March 10 in what flight commanderGeneral Thomas Power termed without hyperbole “the greatest single disasterincurred by any enemy in military history”?The Strategic Bombing Surveyestimated that 87,793 people died in the raid, 40,918 were injured, and1,008,005 people lost their homes.Rhodes, estimating the dead at morethan 100,000 men, women, and children, suggested that probably a millionmore were injured and another million were left homeless. The Tokyo FireDepartment estimated 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded.The Tokyo Policeoffered a figure of 124,711 killed and wounded and 286,358 buildings andhomes destroyed in the raid.

With vast areas of Tokyo in ruins, more than one million residents fled the city.The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom for different reasons had an interest in minimizing the death toll, seems to me implausibly low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors’ accounts.With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peak levels as high as 135,000 per square mile, the highestdensity of any industrial city in the world, and with firefighting measuresludicrously inadequate to the task, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo weredestroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fireblocked tens of thousands fleeing for their lives.

Following the attack, LeMay said that he wanted Tokyo “burned down-wipedright off the map” to “shorten the war.”Tokyo did burn.Subsequent raidsbrought the devastated area of Tokyo to more than 56 square miles provokingthe flight of millions of refugees.No previous or subsequent conventionalbombing raid ever came close to generating the death toll of the greatTokyo raid of March 10, yet the airborne destruction ground onrelentlessly.According to Japanese police statistics, the 65 raids onTokyo between December 6, 1944 and August 13, 1945 resulted in 137,582casualties, 787,145 homes and buildings destroyed, and 2,625,279 peopledisplaced.

The Tokyo raid initiated Japan’s trial by fire.Between March and July,U.S. firebombing destroyed virtually every important Japanese city, killinghundreds of thousands and driving many more to rural areas.By July 1945,U.S. planes had dropped more than 41,000 tons of bombs on Japan renderingan estimated fifteen million homeless.LeMay’s bombers were rapidlyrunning out of targets to strike.

In July, U.S. planes blanketed the few remaining Japanese cities with an“Appeal to the People.”“As you know,” it read, “America, which stands forhumanity, does not wish to injure the innocent people, so you had betterevacuate these cities.”Half the leafleted cities were firebombed withindays of the warning.U.S. planes ruled the skies.Despite the pounding ofthe cities, heavy damage to many important industrial concentrations, andthe inability of other factories to produce due to lack of parts andmaterials, the war ground on.In the spring of 1945, a gravely weakenedJapan, its sea and air power virtually destroyed, bereft of oil (importsceased from February 1945), facing acute food shortages as a result ofdeclining production at home and the loss of vital imports, and its forcesin full retreat across Asia and the Pacific, nevertheless revealed adefensive capacity to inflict the heaviest casualties of the war on theUnited States in its suicidal defense in the Battle for Okinawa. By thistime, Japan’s offensive military capability was virtually eliminated andthe Soviet Union was preparing to enter the war.

Following Japan’s surrender, the Strategic Bombing Survey would bluntly-yetstill skirting the issue of civilian deaths-state the premises of the air assault, as in the opening paragraph of this report on Japanese morale:

The air attack on Japan was directed against the nation as a whole,not only against specific military targets, because of the contributions innumerous ways of the civilian population to the fighting strength of theenemy, and to speed the securing of unconditional surrender.The Americanattack against the “total target” was successful.In addition to enormousphysical destruction, the strategic bombing of the home islands producedgreat social and psychological disruption and contributed to securingsurrender prior to the planned war.

Successful, yes, in producing “great social and psychological disruption,”but the evidence suggests that just as in the German and British bombing ofcities earlier, bombing which destroyed Japan’s cities and exacted soterrible a death toll had no significant effect on securing surrender.Between January and July 1945, the United States firebombed and destroyedall but five Japanese cities, deliberately sparing Kyoto, the ancientimperial capital, and four others from bombing.In the end, the AtomicBomb Selection Committee selected Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasakito display the awesome power of the atomic bomb to Japan and the world.The routinization of the uses of air power for the extermination of urbanpopulations began in Europe with Guernica and Rotterdam and continued withGerman and British attacks on one another’s cities before being extended ona vastly greater scale to Japan.This was the prelude to the atomicbombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Sherry compellingly describes the triumph of American technologicalfanaticism as the hallmark of the air war:‘

The shared mentality of the fanatics of air war was their dedication to assembling and perfecting their methods of destruction, and the way that doing so overshadowed the original purposes justifying destruction. . . . . The lack of a proclaimed intent to destroy, the sense of being driven by the twin demands of bureaucracy and technology, distinguished America’s technological fanaticism from its enemies’

Ideological fanaticism.

Technological fanaticism served to conceal the larger purposes of powerboth from military planners and the public.This wartime technologicalfanaticism in my view is best understood not as antithetical to ideologybut as a means of operationalizing an ideological package whosepresuppositions included the legitimacy and benevolence of American globalpower and the perception of the Japanese as both uniquely brutal andinherently, or in John Dower’s terms racially, inferior.

Between February and August 1945 the U.S. air war reached an intensitythat half a century later remains unrivaled in the magnitude oftechnological slaughter directed against a people.That moment was aproduct of the combination of technological breakthroughs together with theerosion of all moral and political restraints on the killing of civilians.

The “Good War,”Mass Destruction and the Politics of Memory

The targeting for destruction of entire populations, whether indigenouspeoples, religious infidels or others deemed inferior or evil, may be asold as human history, but the forms it takes are as new as the latesttechnologies of air power and nuclear weapons.Among the most importantways in which World War II shaped the moral and technological tenor of massdestruction was the systematic targeting of civilian populations from theair.The ability to destroy an entire city and annihilate its populationin a single bombing raid not only was far more “efficient” than previousmethods of warfare, it also sanitized the process.Air power distancedvictim from executioner, transforming the visual and tactile experience ofannihilation.The bombardier never looks squarely into the eyes of aspecified victim, nor does the act of destruction have the physicaldirectness of decapitation by sword or even shooting with a machine gun.

In U.S. air attacks on Japanese cities, killing was “sanitized” by distanceas well as legitimated by the conviction that it was justified by a goodcause.Nonetheless, the bombing was invariably explained as being directedagainst military targets rather than against women, children and theelderly who were its principal victims.

World War II is unrivalled in the scale of mass destruction.Nazigenocide, Japanese slaughter of Asian civilians, and Soviet losses duringthe German invasion exacted the heaviest toll in human lives.Each of theabove mentioned examples has its unique character and historical andideological origins.All rested on dehumanizing assumptions concerning the“other” and produced largescale slaughter of civilian populations.Fromthe Rape of Nanjing to the bombing of Shanghai, Hankou, Chongqing and othercities, to the annihilation and pacification campaigns carried forwardthroughout the Chinese countryside, to the use of poison gas and thevivisection experiments conducted by Unit 731 to test and developbiological weapons, the death toll in the course of Japan’s fifteen yearChina war far exceeded that inflicted by U.S. bombing of Japan and probablysurpassed the immense Soviet losses in the war that have conventionallybeen estimated at 20 million lives.The war dead in Europe alone in WorldWar II have been estimated in the range of 30 to 40 million, fifty percenthigher than in World War I.To this we must add 25 to 30 million Asianvictims, including 15 to 20 million Chinese, in the fifteen year resistancewar (1931-45), approximately three million Japanese, and millions more inSoutheast Asia.Among the important instances of the killing ofnoncombatants that is an important legacy of the war, the U.S. destructionof Japanese cities is perhaps least known

In World War I, ninety percent of the fatalities directly attributable tothe war were military, nearly all of them Europeans and Americans.According to one estimate, approximately half of the dead in World War IIin Europe were civilians and, when war-induced famine casualties areincluded, the civilian death toll for Asia was almost certainlysubstantially higher in both absolute and percentage terms.The UnitedStates, its homeland untouched by war, suffered approximately 100,000deaths in the entire Asian theatre, a figure lower than that for the singleTokyo air raid of March 10, 1945, and lower than the death toll atHiroshima. By contrast, Japan’s three million war dead in the fifteen yearwar, while thirty times the number of U.S. dead, was still only a smallfraction of the toll suffered by the Chinese who resisted the Japanesemilitary juggernaut throughout a fifteen year war.

The consequences of this shift in the nature of warfare between the worldwars-from the predominance of military to civilian casualties, and thegrowing technological imbalance between warring parties-were profound.This pattern of imbalance of deaths in the Pacific War-twenty millionChinese, three million Japanese, one hundred thousand Americans-moreclosely resembled earlier colonial wars than World War I or the Europeantheatre in World War II, wars in which both sides suffered heavycasualties.U.S. casualties in World War II were a small fraction of thosesuffered by Japan, whose own casualties were in turn minuscule compared tothose suffered by China.

This imbalance in casualties and deaths,mirroring broader patterns of social devastation and deprivation, has beencharacteristic of all subsequent wars in the postwar epoch, reflecting boththe imbalance in the technological resources commanded by opposing forcesand the breakdown of restraints on the killing of noncombatants.World War II remains indelibly engraved in American memory as the “GoodWar” and in important respects it was.In confronting the war machines ofNazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the United States contributed to thedefeat of some of the most brutal and aggressive foes of European and Asianpeoples.But it was also a war that fortuitously served American greatpower interests by weakening not only foes but also allies and otherpotential rivals whose industrial heartlands and cities were destroyed.

For most Americans, it seemed a “Good War” in another sense: the U.S.entered and exited the war buoyed by absolute moral certainty borne of amission to punish aggression in the form of a genocidal Nazi fascism andunbridled colonial aggression.The victory, propelling it to a hegemonicposition which carried authority to condemn and punish war crimes committedby defeated nations, continues to constitute a major obstacle to athoroughgoing reassessment of the United States’ own wartime conduct ingeneral and issues of mass destruction in particular.World War II, building on and extending atavistic impulses deeply rooted inearlier civilizations and combining them with more destructivetechnologies, produced new forms of human depravity.

This essay suggeststhat Nazi genocide, a host of Japanese war crimes ranging from theenslavement of “comfort women” to chemical and biological warfare tocannibalism, and largescale American bombing of Japanese noncombatants rank among the most important of the legacies of the war.Nazi and Japanesecrimes have long been exposed and subjected to international criticism fromthe war crimes tribunals of the 1940s to the present, and most importantlyhave been the subject of reflection and self-criticism by significantgroups within those countries.In contrast to these, and to the ongoingdebates about the uses of the atomic bomb, there has been little awarenessof, not to speak of critical reflection upon the U.S. bombing of Japanesecivilians in the half year prior to Hiroshima.The fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II and the dawn of thenuclear age, coming on the heels of events that signal the end of thePostwar era and the Cold War, offers an occasion for reflection on theAmerican role in the mass destruction of oncombatants that is among theenduring legacies of the “Good War.”

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8 thoughts on “BEFORE THE BOMB”

If wars with other countries aren’t killing innocent people, countries are killing their own people. If you look up “mass murder” in wikipedia, the carnage is pretty staggering. No wonder you like animals so much – there is no comparison.

Wikipedia ?? Great source .. Don’t tell me you can edit Wiki as you see fit ? Try that with the holocaust and see how far you get ,,, Fact of life and a fact of War you can bet your life that the so called victors will whitewash themselves of any collective guilt .. The Rothschild’s funded all sides Allied and Axis forces alike ..They had no patriotic duty to one side or another ..Its all about making Money and growing in power and that is why WWIII is guaranteed .. Its good for business.. Here’s something you won’t find in Wiki, the Jewish leadership of the genocidal Bolsheviks, NKVD or Gulag directors .. They will state those claims are made by Antti Semites..

Sorry, one of the problems with Wikipedia is the ability to change so that a references to it should be checked. My apologies. It used to have a chart of deaths caused by genocides that was staggering. It is gone now.